The Precariousness of Freedom

The Senegal Liberation Database Lesson engages with the complexities of emancipation from slavery in French West Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a historian of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean who regularly teaches world history, I rarely pause to consider the effect of the slave trade's collapse in the nineteenth century on the expansion of coerced labor domestically throughout West Africa. Yet the evidence is quite convincing. European withdrawal from the legal trade in captive Africans did not end slavery in West Africa or lead to their retreat from the region. On the contrary, the discovery of new commodities, such as groundnuts and palm oil, led to the growth of unfree labor on plantations in places like Senegambia and the Gold Coast. The growing demand for these products compelled French and British expansion into West Africa, whose officials struggled to enforce liberal reforms such as emancipation in their newly acquired territories when it was clear that the commodities they so desperately desired, such as groundnuts and palm oil rested on the hands of coerced labor. European administrators and liberal reformers tried to reconcile moral concerns with imperial imperatives and economic realities. Due to the careful curation of translated original textual sources, charts, and an introductory essay, the lesson is easy to include in a class or course on the Atlantic World, the African diaspora, or comparative slavery and emancipation. By focusing on contestations over freedom and centering the experiences of Senegalese minors, it clearly shows the liminality of freedom. Moreover, it offers several entry points for instructors with expertise in slavery and emancipation, Atlantic studies, or world history to engage with the compelling material. After carefully reading the lesson, it struck me as helpful to history educators, particularly those not trained in West African history or the Atlantic slave trade. As I reflect on the lesson plan, it raises three questions for me: (1) how does the case of tutelle in French West Africa fit within the long arc of nineteenth-century emancipation struggles? (2) what can be gained from learning about the experience of minors in slavery or emancipation? (3) how can data and digital humanities tools better help us to understand these stories of liminal freedom?The long nineteenth century (1789–1914) was an age of emancipation where unfree and dependent peoples increasingly gained individual freedom in many societies. This process played out vividly across the Atlantic World. In Haiti, formerly enslaved people rebelled against the plantation system that denied them freedom. Due to the individual and collective agency of enslaved peoples and free people of color, Haitians used first legislation and then warfare to achieve freedom from France and chattel slavery in 1804. Inspired by liberalism and provoked to act due to the victory of Haitian revolutionaries and subsequent slave resistance as in The Baptist War of 1831–32 in Jamaica, governments in Europe and the Americas ended the slave trade in the early years of the nineteenth century. Great Britain, the largest state involved in the slave trade, in an about-face sent the Royal Navy's West African Squadron to suppress slave trading by British subjects and others who signed agreements with them. With the capturing of over 1,600 ships, tens of thousands of liberated Africans never fully actualized their freedom. Although many of them ended up in Sierra Leone, a significant portion remained in the Caribbean and Latin America. In Cuba, for instance, liberated Africans, including minors, often were reenslaved rather than completely freed due to the fear of Cuban planters seeking to prohibit the growth of free population of color, whom they saw as the natural allies of enslaved Africans and African-descended peoples. As a result, they devised plans to circumvent legislation to liberate these captive Africans in strikingly similar ways as suggested in the lesson plan. A well-documented case tells this story.In 1841, abolitionist David Turnbull served as British consul and superintendent over these liberated Africans in Havana. One case was particularly disturbing to him. He came to learn about an emancipado known as Gabino who had been one of 58 Africans taken from present-day Liberia who was later liberated from an illicit slave ship called Fingal in 1826. The Havana Court of Mixed Commission, an international court overseen by Cubans and British officials, investigated and declared that Gabino and the others should be liberated from this unlawful enslavement. Gabino was just ten years old at the time and his name was Dobo. Upon becoming liberated, he was given a Christian name and was to work for five years under someone's stewardship in exchange for some compensation. Gabino was handed over to Luísa Asper de la Paz who had him work as a water carrier (or aguador). He received a compensation of only one peso per day. Due to bribery, Doña de la Paz paid officials to extend his service to two five-year terms. As neither a free-born or enslaved person, Gabino lived in a precarious state and had little legal recourse. In 1840, Doña de la Paz died and yet Gabino's labor contract did not end. It was transferred to her heir who refused to pay him the measly daily sum, which forced Gabino to seek state intervention from the British superintendent by passing the Spanish colonial system in Cuba. By the time Gabino had told of the ways Cuban officials denied him his liberty in 1841, he had spent fifteen years in de facto slavery.1A similar pattern to limit the freedom of captive Africans or enslaved peoples was replicated across the Atlantic World. It is notable that, an increasing number of places connected to plantation agriculture and global capitalism were too deeply dependent on unfree labor. Although the abolition of the slave trade was the first step, other places ultimately ended slavery. Most leaders, however, took a gradual approach toward slave emancipation. In the British Caribbean, the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 did not grant outright freedom to its enslaved populations. Instead, Parliament introduced a transitory process called the “Apprenticeship System.” As apprentices, recently freedpeople had to work for their ex-slaveholders in exchange for low wages for a certain number of years. In the northern United States and Latin America, similar legislation conferred freedom to the children of enslaved mothers born after a specific date or after the children worked for their mothers’ former owners for some time. This transitory process was fraught as freedpeople vigorously contested their unfree status through protests, petitions, and using legal institutions to gain greater protections. Like we see with the case of the two female minors in the Senegalese lesson, freedom was tenuous, particularly for a generation of children denied full emancipation but also inspired new models of servitude.In addition to the liberated Africans, state officials in other places in the Atlantic World also set narrow legal parameters of this transitory freedom where they implemented gradual emancipation. The Moret Law of 1870, for instance, emancipated slaves in Cuba and Puerto Rico, specifically, enslaved men who fought for the Spanish against Cuban independence fighters, elderly enslaved people of sixty years or older, and finally, the children born to enslaved mothers after September 16, 1868. While the first two groups immediately obtained full civil rights, the law circumscribed the freedom of minors. It placed them into a patronage system or patronato, which required freed minors to work for their mother's master without compensation until fourteen or eighteen years of age (depending on sex) in exchange for their physical well-being and vocational training.2 Karina Cespedes has noted that these age limits likely reflected a way to regulate sexual violence against girl apprentices put into prostitution.3 Although not likely an effective deterrent, it offered the illusion of a respectable condition within society as a married adult. In the British Caribbean, Parliament instituted a similar system called the apprenticeship. It required recently emancipated people older than six years of age to continue to labor for their former slaveholders in exchange for a small wage, food, housing, and time off without labor for a tenure of four to seven years depending on previous work as a domestic or field laborer. Proposed as a mechanism to prepare emancipated peoples for life as freedpeople, as scholars have argued, it was mostly an avenue to appease and compensate ex-slaveholders. Except for Bermuda and Antigua where slaveholding planters agreed to full emancipation, viewing it as less costly than paying for the upkeep for apprentices, elsewhere in the British Caribbean apprenticeship served as a short-lived transition phase.4 In terms of the law, the youngest children were exempt from the apprenticeship, however, minors older than six years of age faced the same conditions as adult apprentices. With help from Quaker abolitionist Joseph Sturge, eighteen-year-old Jamaican apprentice James Williams vividly reported the abuse he and other apprentices received at the hands of their employers. They received poor housing, insufficient food, a lack of medical care, physical punishment, and sexual abuse.5 Historian Colleen Vasconcelos has argued how Jamaican employers worked apprentice children as hard as an adult to extract as much labor before the apprenticeship ended.6Given my brief reference to similar processes in the wider Atlantic World, the Senegalese lesson plan explores the precariousness of freedom in an accessible way. Its opening essay contextualizes the archival sources and introduces the French West African system of guardianship or tutelle to educators and students. This French colonial legislation sought to reconcile the liberal impulse to end slavery across all French territories and grant emancipated people citizenship, whether in the Caribbean or West Africa while acknowledging slaveholder resistance to the colonial state's interference in new and long-held systems of unfreedom. Article 7 of the 1848 legislation to abolish slavery in the colonies codified emancipation into a narrow, legal process. First, it stated that the article's applicability depended on the citizenship status of the slaveholder; non-French citizens were exempt. Second, it narrowed the territorial scope of French soil to the settlements of Saint Louis and Gorée. Third, French administrators disproportionately enforced the law in cases where the slaveholders came from uncooperative African polities, which minimized disruption to the demand for labor in domestic households and growing plantations in the hinterlands. The essay offers sufficient context to the specific dynamics relevant to the cases while offering an opportunity to engage more directly with West African internal politics.And while the tutelle cases reflect similar approaches to slave emancipation as seen elsewhere in the Atlantic World, we should not undercut the important differences. Awa Diop and Sigue Guye, the two female minors in Saint Louis worked as domestics in households. Although some emancipated minors in the Americas also worked as domestics, the economic and political conditions varied and thus many worked on plantations. The type of work matters. It circumscribed the avenues of attaining a personal sense of freedom. Scholars of slavery in the Atlantic World have long noted how urban spaces offered opportunities to build communal networks, gain knowledge to find work or escape, and identify institutions of authority to ameliorate their circumstance.7 Moreover, it is important to recognize that Awa Diop and Sigue Guye also were born from West African societies who had their systems of unfree labor that predated the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery. As Trevor Getz has shown in his award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, women (and minors) who sought full freedom within these liminal spaces had to navigate a web of overlapping notions of freedom and mobility appropriate for minors and women from West African and Atlantic World cultural norms.8 It is less likely that emancipated minors in the Americas had to navigate endemic African gender norms to the same degree, given their dislocation and uprootedness from home and traditional mechanisms of authority.The lesson plan includes an appendix titled “Data Visualizations,” which includes eight charts and bar graphs drawn from a preliminary analysis of the registers of slave liberation for the years 1894 to 1903. These figures invite educators to use them as tools to teach our students to draw conclusions and arguments from the data collected from this particular record. In doing so, it expands the discussion to query variables such as gender and age and their relations to the number of people becoming apprentices. Moreover, the data visualizations are a reminder of how historians are increasingly turning to data and digital tools to study the slave trade, slavery, and emancipation. In the past decade, the number of digital databases, exhibits, and websites on slavery and emancipation studies has grown tremendously. Perhaps one of the best known and funded is Slave Voyages, which began as a crowd-sourced trans-Atlantic slave trade database but has expanded and includes an intra-American Slave Trade Database and African Names Database. These three databases now allow researchers, educators, and students to investigate an array of topics from tracing a particular set of voyages from an enslaver to searching for patterns in the origins of captive Africans forcibly brought to the Americas. Although there has been some caution on whether or how data can be used to recover the voices and fullness of the lived experiences of captive Africans and their enslaved descendants, digital projects such as Slave Voyages are new educational resources to be explored.9 Moreover, it could easily support this lesson plan and provide a wider context for the Atlantic slave trade with additional data visualizations. For example, the project has several introductory maps, which students in a West African history course may be no more familiar with than a student in World History or Atlantic Slavery courses. Just as the Senegalese lesson focuses on the reverberations of an Atlantic World system in French West Africa, a few well-chosen maps and data visualizations can also provide an immediate context. Moreover, additional essays and even charts regarding the seasonality of the slave trade or connections between harvest cycles and trans-Atlantic slave trade pathways might offer an avenue for further discussion.For readers interested in drawing connections between the cases in French West Africa to similar processes in other places in the Atlantic world, I turn them to another digital resource, “The Free Womb Project,” a multilingual (English, Spanish, and Portuguese) platform with gradual emancipation laws from fifteen different countries. It was created by historian Yesenia Barragan, who wrote an award-winning monograph on gradual abolition in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia in the middle of the nineteenth century.10 Surprisingly, the digital project does not include the apprenticeship law in the British Caribbean but offers transcribed laws from Portugal, Latin America, and the United States. It also provides an introductory essay and an abbreviated bibliography for more context. Creative educators likely will find tremendous value in having access to these sources for additional opportunities to develop classroom activities and assignments.An end to Atlantic slavery did not translate into complete freedom for those recently relinquished from their enslavement. Freedom and unfreedom were overlapping conditions with specific legal, cultural, and individual definitions. As this lesson plan makes clear, any discussion of freedom must also consider the boundaries of unfreedom. What makes this set of educational resources particularly revealing is that it examines the experiences of minors, which has recently captured the attention of historians. In doing so, it is hearing the call from scholars such as Saidiya Hartman who invite us to bring into light the experiences of enslaved people often made invisible in the archival record but who can help us to understand how bondage remained in different formats after slavery formally ended in the Atlantic world.11

Business · Political science · Political Economy and Marxism